The Best Orange Cranberry Sauce

The best Orange Cranberry Sauce recipe you’ll ever make! With only four simple ingredients, this simple make-ahead dish will help you rock the holidays.

Ok friends, let’s be clear about one thing. This is not the canned cranberry sauce that your great aunt slops into a bowl for Thanksgiving. You know the kind that comes out of a can, makes a squelching sound when it slithers out and could retain the shape of the can even during a nuclear holocaust.

This is not that sauce. This cranberry sauce has depth and flavor. It has legs. It is cranberry like cranberry was meant to be.

At many holiday dinners, I am one of the only ones who want cranberry sauce. Apparently, the deliciousness that is cranberry sauce is polarizing to people. I think it is because they have only tried the overly-sweet stuff that comes out of the aforementioned creepy can.

Many people who make cranberry sauce from scratch make it way too complicated. They add dried fruits, liquors, or even worse, nuts. No. Just no. This sauce has four simple ingredients, is a cinch to make, and has a flavor that makes you sit up and ask for more.

It tastes even better the next day and will keep in the fridge for a week or freezer for a month. Plus you get to make it yours by deciding how much texture is in the final product.

In a medium saucepan, combine orange juice and sugar. Bring to a boil.

Add the cranberries, and reduce the heat to medium. Allow it to cook until you start to hear the cranberries popping.

With a wooden spoon or potato masher (what I use), smash down the cranberries until it reaches your desired texture. I prefer mostly mushed with a few whole berries sprinkled in there.

Remove from heat and stir in the orange zest. Allow sauce to cool for 20 minutes at room temperature (so it doesn't heat up your fridge), and transfer to an air-tight container and store in the refrigerator. It will thicken a bit as it cools.

Recipe Notes

This recipe is super easy to scale. The ingredients listed make one batch but simply double or triple to create enough for a big crowd.

Cranberry sauce is one of the best things to make ahead of a holiday event. It tastes even better the next day and will keep in the fridge for days.

If you're like me and want cranberry sauce year round, buy bags when they go on sale after the holidays to freeze.

This post contains affiliate links and we may earn a commission at no additional cost to you if you click through and make a purchase. This allows me to continue to provide free content, and I only share products that I use and love myself.

8 comments on “The Best Orange Cranberry Sauce”

Yum! Random cranberry side note: We buy the bags of whole cranberries when they go on sale, then throw one in a gallon size ziplock back and use that as an ice pack. The berries hold up really well and mold to whatever injured part of the body.

Yum! Cranberry sauce. We just had our Thanksgiving here in Canada, and my recipe is quite similar to yours (except I add cinnamon). The Dialect Quiz was fun! It ended up pegging me as either from St. Paul, Minnesota, or Buffalo, New York. Not too bad as I am a Canadian originally from Manitoba who’s lived all over the country before settling onto the west coast.

I think the timing of Canadian Thanksgiving makes so much more sense than US Thanksgiving. If it is meant to celebrate the harvest, late November (our Thanksgiving) is the worst possible time to do so. Nothing is growing in November and all the traditional foods that are served at dinner aren’t actually in season. It makes zero sense to me!